Highlights from our third year
We published a paper, a Nature News and Views, and new preprints!
Our paper on sugar taste processing was published in Cell Reports! This study was led by research technician Ruby Jacobs along with the help of several other lab members. The paper investigates how the sugar taste circuit diverges into different pathways that mediate different behavioral responses and how these behaviors are modulated.
We posted a new preprint on connectomic analyses of taste circuits! This study, led by undergraduate Sydney Walker and PhD student Marco Peña Garcia, provides a comprehensive overview of circuits for early taste processing. We recently resubmitted a revised version of the paper, so we hope to see it published in a journal soon.
Dr. Devineni wrote a Nature News and Views article about the publication of the first Drosophila whole-brain connectome. She was also quoted in the New York Times and Science Magazine articles about the connectome.
We contributed imaging data to a study on dArc1 by Sophie Caron’s lab, which has been posted as a preprint.
We celebrated new lab members joining.
We welcomed a new technician, Yuzhen Chen, who is a recent graduate of Binghamton University with experience in fly taste from Pavel Masek’s lab.
We were thrilled that Neuroscience PhD student Elle McCall decided to join our lab, becoming the lab’s third graduate student. She comes with experience in rodent sensory processing from her NIH postbac.
We added two new undergraduate students, Alex Koeppel and Penny Wang, and SOAR student Joyce Yeo worked with us over the summer before returning to her studies at Colby College. Three fourth-year undergrads from last year, Lam Nguyen, Anna Perry, and Sydney Walker also continued their research in the lab.
We said goodbye to lab members moving on to bigger and better things.
One of our first lab members, research technician Fiorella Lozada-Perdomo, left the lab in March to take a data analyst position at Wellstar, achieving her goal of breaking into the healthcare field. Our other OG technician, Ruby Jacobs, will be leaving at the end of December to start a masters program at the University of Georgia.
Two of our undergraduates, Crystal Wang and Maia Yang, defended their honors theses and graduated from Emory last spring. Crystal is now a medical student at Johns Hopkins University and Maia is working at a startup in New Jersey.
We had a bunch of lab celebrations, including our end of the school year celebration, summer party, Halloween pumpkin decorating, and December holiday party.
Our third-year grad students, Marco Peña Garcia and Trinity Pruitt, passed their qualifying exams. They are now the lab’s first official PhD candidates!
We submitted 8 grants and 6 fellowship applications. Most of these applications are still in review or have been resubmitted after revision… fingers crossed!
We began our third year of funding from the Whitehall Foundation and our second year of NIH R01 funding. We are grateful to our funders for their support!
We also had plenty of setbacks, which we tried to learn and move on from. For example:
lab flood and repairs that shut down half the lab
mite infestation
a $120,000 laser that decided to stop turning on one day
control fly stocks that decided to stop behaving like controls
grant rejections
data that made no sense
We’re looking forward to doing more awesome science in 2025, and we’re recruiting new people! Learn about joining the lab here.
Like every year, we want to thank everyone who has helped and supported us! That includes all our amazing colleagues at Emory and Georgia Tech and beyond. Special thanks to Robert Liu, Anita Corbett, Gordon Berman, Sam Sober, Leila Rieder, Malu Murugan, Alan Emanuel, Dieter Jaeger, and Astrid Prinz. We also want to thank the Biology department chair Steve L’Hernault and the staff members who make sure things run smoothly and help us deal with crises, from power outages to building floods to missing grant checks… we are lucky to be in the best department ever!